Shuttle Nearing Space Station And Causing A Traffic Jam

Published: December 2, 2000

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 1—
As the NASA space shuttle Endeavour closed in on the International Space Station today, the astronauts who have been living on the station for a month dealt with their first traffic jam.

Two Russian Progress supply craft were already docked to the $60 billion complex, so to make room for the shuttle, Russian ground controllers undocked one Progress and parked it in orbit about a mile beneath the station.

Endeavour is on an 11-day mission to hang a pair of solar-power panels, described as wings, on the space station. The thousands of photoelectric cells on the panels, which stretch 240 feet from tip to tip and cost $600 million, will power the station for years.

The shuttle and its crew of five will arrive Saturday and extend the solar array, wings furled, into space to acclimate to the temperature. On Sunday, shuttle astronauts will execute a marathon spacewalk to attach the array to the station and unfurl the giant wings. It will be NASA's most complicated construction job.

Progress ships, which are virtually identical to the Soyuz spacecraft used to carry Russians to space for about 30 years, arrive as cargo ships and depart as garbage scows.

They bring in food, oxygen, fuel, clothing and space-station hardware. They take garbage back into Earth's atmosphere, where the friction causes the spacecraft to burn up.

In this case, the Russians may try to redock the ship after Endeavour departs. That is because the ship's automatic pilot failed when it arrived two weeks ago, and Lt. Col. Yuri P. Gidzenko, a Russian member of the station crew, had to complete the docking by remote control. The Russians want to see if they have fixed the problem with a software patch.

On the United States' side of operations, a redocking is somewhat controversial because a degree of risk is always involved. A runaway Progress ship collided with the Russian Mir station in 1997 and caused an air leak that almost forced the crew to abandon ship.

''We're still waiting for a report from the Russians about why they did not achieve a fully automated docking,'' said Bob Cabana, an astronaut and ground-based space-station manager. ''We're waiting for the full report, and we're waiting for a rationale as to why we would do this.''

Chart: ''STEP BY STEP: Adding Solar Power'' The space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station today and begin unloading huge solar-power wings, to be attached as an addition to the space station. 1. Endeavour will approach the station from below. The commander will guide its final maneuvers and dock with the Unity module. 2. The shuttle's robotic arm will lift the solar assembly out of the cargo bay and hold it in space to adjust the temperature. On Sunday, two astronauts will emerge from the shuttle to help guide it into place. 3. After hours of work, the spacewalkers will deploy the solar arrays, whose total wing span is over 240 feet. After completing other tasks, the shuttle crew is scheduled to return Dec. 11. (Source: NASA)